After serving as Director of the Brockport Writers Forum & Videotape Library (SUNY) for many years, Stan Rubin moved to the Olympic Peninsula in 2003 as founding director of the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA at Pacific Lutheran University. He has published poems in such journals as AGNI, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The Laurel Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, and others. He is the author of three previous full-length collections, Hidden Sequel (Barrow Street Press, 2006), winner of the Barrow Street Book Prize; Five Colors (WordTech, 2004); and Midnight (State Street Press, 1995), as well as two chapbooks, On the Coast (2002) and Lost (1981). His work has been anthologized in The Poets Guide to the Birds (Anhinga Press, 2011) and Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets (Oregon State University Press, 2006) and elsewhere. His poetry has received a Constance J. Saltonstall Foundation fellowship for Poetry. "Complexity" was published in There. Here., his 2013 collection published by Lost Horse Press.

I see pale yellow aspen leavesalong the shaded background mountainsidewhich quake and quiver in the slightest windas if they are determined to maintaintheir named identity in bold defianceof the seasons' change to duller hues—and share their mood of glum diminishing. So what is it about this momentary glowof quaking yellow aspen leaves,waving along white-grayish boughs,accompanied by shrieking crows,cascading under purple clouds,that suddenly evoke in me a shudderfor all transient breathing things:

They shook the green leaves down,those men that rattledin their sleep. Truth becamea nightmare to their fox.He turned their horses into fish,or was it horses strunglike fish, or fish like fishhung naked in the wind?

Stars fell upon their catch.A girl, not yet twenty-fourbut blonde as morning birds, begana dance that drew the men ingreen around her skirts.In dust her magic jangled memoriesof dawn, till fox and griefturned nightmare in their sleep.